Unit 8: Business Applications of
social media
M1. Assess the different ways in which an organisation can use social media to promote products
or services to a target audience
Social media platforms are versatile for multiple different people. However, organisations can use
this to their advantage for them to achieve and gather more of their target audiences. So, in this
essay, I will be assessing the different ways in which organisations can use social media to promote
their products and services to reach their target audiences.
Different Ways of Using Social Media for Organisations
There are multiple diverse ways that an organisation can use social media to promote products or
services to a target audience. One way that an organisation can use social media to promote their
products to target the audiences is by investing in advertising on social media platforms. Most
organisations do this to promote their products and services when they advertise online. For
example, an organisation such as 20th Century Fox can pay twitter to advertise trailers for their
upcoming movies. Organisations are also open to multiple different social media platforms which
allows them to advertise their products and services to more targeted audiences or customers.
Spotify’s target audience are mostly everyone who is interested to music. The organisation can use
multiple social medias to reach their target audiences such as in Instagram by using their stories
features and in YouTube which can allow people to listen to different genres of music throughout
the advertisement. A different way for an organisation to use social media platforms to promote
their products and services to a target audience is by using celebrities or influencers online.
Organisations can ask to sign contracts with different influencers to allow them to advertise their
products. For example, Asap Rocky have posted on Instagram that he has joined Gucci which allows
the company to show off their products to Asap Rocky’s audiences.
Another way that an organisation can use social media for promoting their products and services to
reach their target audience is by identifying places where their target audiences are. This means that
they should research on where their target audience are most likely to be. For example, using
hashtags may help as some people may be interested in the topic of the hashtag. Just like the
hashtag #fashion on Instagram which allows people who find clothing or fashion interesting look at
the organisation's products faster. Another way in which an organisation can use social media to
promote their products or services to a target audience is by communicating with them. This can
easily be done as they can find their target audience on the comment sections on some posts. For
, example, Facebook’s comment section can contain a lot
of people who are giving feedback and the organisation
can ask or reply to them on the comment section to see if
they are part of the target audience. This image came
from theme.co.
Factors Affecting the Use of Social Media
However, there are some factors or events that may
affect the effectiveness of the social media platform that
is being used to target a specific audience. One factor that may
affect the use of social media when targeting an audience is the
demographic. Demographics is related to the population in a
place and their characteristics. So, for example, in school, they
would have to take the age, sex, attendance, and many more and
the total population in school to produce a demographic. This
would affect the choice of social media that an organisation
would use as they would need the demographics to be able to
target the specific audience. The Pampers brand, which sells
diapers for babies, would want to promote their products on Facebook as it can target their specific
audience which are the parents. The demographic in Facebook would be older people which can
mean that most of them are parents. Another factor that an organisation must consider when
choosing the social media is the competition. This is because there are a lot of businesses that uses
social media to promote their products. So other customers may choose the other businesses
products more than your businesses products. Another factor that can affect the choice of social
media that is used to promote products or services to a target audience is time. This is because
advertising in social media is time consuming and it can make the organisation tired. They would
have to manage the advertising actively as it may fail if they don’t monitor it regularly.
Source of image: Iconfinder.com
Here are some social media’s audience profiles which is gathered from The 2022 Social Media Users
Demographics Guide | Khoros.
Facebook
- 56% users are male and 44% users are female
- Most users are aged between 25 years to 35 years
-£28k - £34k per household
Instagram
- 48.4% Female users and 51.8% Male users
- 31% users are ages 18-24 and 31.2% users are ages 25-34
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